Swimsuit advice: Dress like a mermaid

When French car engineer Louis Réard introduced the modern bikini at a Paris fashion show in 1946, it took more than a decade and Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman to popularize it. For the maillot, the clingy one-piece later worn by pin-ups like Betty Grable, it took only one movie with Esther Williams.

In May, when Williams was the featured star of the month on Turner Classic Movies, it wasn't just the fan mail that "came in truckloads," says Edward Bell, the million-dollar mermaid's husband and the president of the company that designs and licenses her line of swimsuits. The official Esther Williams swimwear website saw "an enormous jump in sales after her movies aired," he says.

The styles are either inspired by or taken from actual costumes that Williams wore in her movies, updated and interpreted in modern swimsuit fabrics. For example, the classic two-piece sheath is the very same design Williams wore in Andy Hardy's Double Life to give Rooney that famous underwater kiss that earned her the monicker "the Woo-Woo Girl." "It is what our customer expects from us," Bell says. "Every once in a while we'll add a new style, such as a halter swimdress or a tankini, but these designs don't seem to have the endurance of the classics." And, he adds, "Esther is always happiest with the classic lines."

Williams was a champion swimmer before she was an actress -she taught Elizabeth Taylor to swim in a pool on the MGM backlot -- but it was her sparkly presence and perfect dives as the originator and star of MGM's much-vaunted aquamusicals of the 1940s and 1950s that cemented her iconic swim look. In hits such as Bathing Beauty, Dangerous When Wet and Neptune's Daughter, critic James Agee likened her to "a porpoise amused by its own sex appeal." Today, her company sells these classics through its own site as well as to other retailers. Their shopping site is, it must be said, rather creaky, but on the more kicky merchandised Modcloth shop, where the demographic is 18-35, the Esther Williams offerings are crisply displayed on a variety of young women (of both regular-and plus-size body types) and the plethora of plaids, ginghams and prints routinely sell out upon arrival.

The most popular swimsuit in the Esther Williams collection is the classic one-piece sheath. "It is the design that is taken directly from Esther's swimwear in her films," says Bell, "and the suit has an elegance that might be called cinematic. Women write and tell us they feel like Esther when they wear her classic swimwear."

This season, Jantzen also offers several one-piece styles based on models from its 1950s archives. There are also several more covered-up, shapely styles like the Lola pin-up from Shan, Chantal Levesque's Quebec-based swimwear label; the designer recently won designer of the year at the International Mode City show in Paris.

Likewise Minnow Bathers, the niche Canadian swim label, which takes its styling cues from the Williams heyday. In-the-know girls (and boys) have been snapping the modest suits and trunks up (for the boys, think high-waisted belted trunks as worn by Victor Mature or Ricardo Montalbán in one of Williams' aquatic extravaganzas -- or Sean Connery in Dr. No). "We were looking at a lot of vintage photographs from the 1940s and 1950s," explains Vanessa Warrack, who co-founded Minnow Bathers swimwear with friend Karen Donaldson. "This year we've already sold, to date, more than we did all of last summer, which is kind of crazy!

"I think people just wear what's available to them and the reason we started making bathing suits is that we wanted ones that weren't that tiny," she continues. "Our friends didn't want to wear that stuff, and we didn't want to wear it." The goal was swimsuits that didn't just look pretty but functioned -without being too skimpy. "We are big into summer and swimming and camping and jumping off cliffs and stuff -- we're pretty active," Warrack laughs, "and usually you'd lose your top." They also keep women with different body types in mind when designing (it reportedly took Minnow three years to perfect the fit of their core swimsuit). "A very small population of people feel comfortable wearing teeny suits," Warrack says, "and we get emails from girls thanking us for more coverage."

Minnow's most popular suit is the one-piece floral with strategic triangle cutout at the midriff, reminiscent of last midcentury staple, and a crossfront two-piece with a high waist panty that proved such a hit, they now also sell a black version of the panty, solo, by popular demand. For the past few years, Bell says, cherries and polka dots have outpaced the Esther Williams floral designs. "Good Hawaiian prints are always popular but good ones are hard to find. Warrack would agree: Finding funky swim fabric can be tough. "A lot of stuff is way '80s. It's fun to hunt for it, though!" Psychedelic fabric is next on their list, with the retro styling to match. "We'll probably try to go into a more 1970s shape with that," she says, "a classic one-piece of really skinny straps, cut really low in the front. Really simple and sleek."

"It gives Esther a real spark to know that there is so much love out there for her work," Bell adds. A Broadway musical based on Williams' biography Million Dollar Mermaid is in the works and will showcase their swimwear styles, "so," he opines, "I don't think we've even seen the top of our business"

In an age of less is more and barely there outfits, how to explain the appeal of a swimsuit style perfected more than 60 years ago? "I think young women today like to be dressed, like to look pretty," Bell suggests. "Pretty" seems to be a healthy antidote to an economic bleakness. As Esther says, "a swimsuit is the least amount of clothing a woman can wear in public, so it better look good."

And if not, ladies, I've got four other words for you: Spanx now makes swimwear.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BATHING COSTUME

The modern swimsuit evolved from the sunshine beach costumes of the 1920s that the Jantzen company pioneered. Originally playsuits for this new "sportif" lifestyle were made of wool jersey (in 1929, they advertised sun-suits "tightly knitted from the strongest long-fibred wool"), whose shirring and elasticized nylon sagged when wet. When there was a bare midriff in the early 1940s, it was to save wartime material in the playsuits that had short skirts over panties and bralike tops. By 1949, Jantzen was advertising "fine cotton corduroy" rompers and shorts, men's swim boxers in Celanese rayon and Lastexpowered fabrics with girdle control and uplift bras. In the early 1950s, influenced by Paris couture's revival after the war, American swim brands introduced a more Parisian-inspired swimsuit that was modelled like an evening gown, with panels and structure; the models wore lipstick and jewellery in the ads. Alberta's own Rose Marie Reid designed the bathing costumes worn by Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford in their heyday and could manipulate fabric on the bias like Vionnet, draping to disguise proportionate hips using elaborate boning, halter necks and wire bras. Soon the cinched waist style had Jantzen touting its "shapemakery" technique of long-body structure swimsuits with torso control and built-in bras. Not exactly comfort-wear for swimming the English channel, let alone laps in a pool.

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Swimsuit advice: Dress like a mermaid

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